


nothing is crueler (than loving and being loved by a prophet)

by orphan_account



Category: Marvel, Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Inspired by Poetry, also loki cries a lot, disciples who love their messiahs too much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-19
Updated: 2013-04-19
Packaged: 2017-12-08 21:35:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/766270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, Sigyn learns the twelve lessons on loving a messiah, no matter how twisted they be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	nothing is crueler (than loving and being loved by a prophet)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Lessons on Loving a Prophet](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/20347) by Jeanann Verlee. 



-one-

His innards spill all over the floor, blood smeared across the marble where he lays.

Sigyn’s heart stutters to a stop as she sees him. It’s bad. It’s too bad. She can’t – she can’t save him, oh Nornir. First her sons, now her boy – no.

Sigyn kneels down next to his head, strokes his blood-matted hair. He smiles wearily up at her. “How bad is it?” He croaks.

“Fine,” she lies through her teeth. “You’ll be fine. I’m one of Asgard’s top healers, aren’t I?”

Loki laughs. “You always were an awful liar.”  
“Hush up. Let me get your viscera back inside you before you start laughing,” Sigyn admonishes him, tears springing up in her eyes.

He falls silent as she carefully pushes his entrails back into the hole in his abdomen from which they’re coming. He is unconscious by the time she has stitched him back up.

Sigyn breathes heavily as she watches her boy slip further and further away from the realm of the living. She clenches her hands together, and tries not to cry when she can’t see his chest move anymore.

-two-

When she is young, and just starting her apprenticeship with Eir, the second prince comes in with an injured wrist.

Eir tuts and admonishes him for being hurt once again (apparently it is the third time this month) while healing him. “Watch closely, Sigyn,” Eir instructs her.

She does watch closely. She pays sharp attention to the healing – but she can’t help noticing something off about the second prince.

 There is a distance in his eyes not caused by the pain of his wrist; he stares past her like she is not even there, or as if he does not see her. His face is closed off, vague and blank in all the ways that matter. And in those green eyes that pay no mind to her, she sees the swirls of chaos and mischief he is supposed to embody.

 _Oh_ , Sigyn thinks, her throat rough, _he is just a boy in a man’s body._

-three-

He repeats her name. Sigyn, Sigyn, his lips are a fountain and her name is the water that runs through it again and again. He rolls the sound of it around in his mouth and smiles each time he says it.

Her skin burns for his touch. He has touched her before, but only briefly. Now she feels each place he’s touched her burning hot - a hand on her arm, gently brushing her hair back behind her ear, a soft touch on her back for only a second before taking it away. Her body grows warm with the thought of it.

 “Sigyn. Can you dance?” He asks her out of the blue, curiosity in his voice.

“Yes,” she tells him, licking her lips as subtly as she can.

“I’d like to watch,” he says, voice open and raw.

Sigyn smiles. “Of course.”

She dances while he watches. She sees where his eyes catch the most; he watches the smooth bones of her ankle as she twirls lightly on her feet and her skirts rise up, he watches the way her hips sway and pivot, and he watches the way her loose hair spins out behind her and drums on her back. 

That does not mean these are the only places he looks, Sigyn knows, for she finds him looking at her clothed breasts more than once.

She knows from these looks that he desires her as she desires him.

“Stop,” he says softly. Then, he gestures to the furs of great beasts that lie on the floor, inviting her.

She expects him to curl around her when she lies down, to cover her body with his and drive in, or to push her skirts up and shirt down, but it doesn’t happen. They touch very little. His hand delicately rests atop her arm, and her foot only barely nudges against his leg.

They lie on his furs for a long time, fully dressed and hardly touching, even as the sun disappears behind the horizon. When the sky streaming in through the window is starry, Sigyn gets up to leave.

“Sigyn?” He asks with his voice quiet as he too sits up.

The sound of her name on his lips tugs at her like a leash does on a dog, but it doesn’t bother Sigyn. She smiles tolerantly at him and stays.

They do not touch for the rest of the night.

-four-

“Oh, Sigyn,” he says with wonder evident in his tone. “You’re a wonder. A splendor. A diamond-in-the-rough, a miracle past even my father’s working.”

Sigyn runs her hands lightly over his arms, smiling. “You think me more magnificent than your father’s magic?”  
“Yes,” Loki says, voice hoarse. “Oh, by the Tree, stay with me.”

“I will,” Sigyn says easily.

“Do you promise?” Loki asks, in the voice of a child who’s lost his mother.

“Yes,” Sigyn answers, hands finding his and clenching tight.

-five-

She kisses Loki with the deepest passion, as if she were trying to drink down all of his cleverness and all of his magic. She leaves dark bruises on his neck and collarbone, marking him as her boy.

She picks up one pale arm and kisses her way down it, leaving physical traces of her love on his body. When Loki extends an ankle to her, she kisses that skinny protruding bone as well. She kisses his purpled eyelids tenderly.

Sigyn lavishes ferocious love on every part of him, and does not hesitate in doing so. Love is not hesitation, but surety, and she loves so deeply. She cannot play coy in courting her boy; the very thought makes her shudder. She is hungry for his love.

-six-

The palace servants call her a whore and a slattern. Sigyn nods with a calm grace and smiles at them. She tells her boy, and no one dares to do it again.

-seven-

“I have had other lovers,” Loki confesses quietly, “and I drove them all to madness.”

Sigyn raises an eyebrow. “You are irritating sometimes, yes, but I can’t see how you would drive a woman to insanity.”

“I don’t know,” he says, “But it was awful. The first was – oh, it was a sweet girl, named Angrboda. Very tall, had a touch of jötunn in her. I had three children by her. Sweet Hela, fierce Fenrisulfr, ferocious Jormungandr.”

“And?” Sigyn asks.

“I left her, for a short time,” he whispers, sounding ashamed. “Asgard needed me more than she did, or so I thought. She threw poor Jormungandr into the sea, where he drowned. Poor Hel was throttled to death. By then, Fenris had grown wary. She was not able to kill him, but she managed to chain him in some unknown location; no one has found him or rescued him, so likely he lays dead somewhere of starvation.”

Sigyn rubs her boy’s shoulder soothingly. “And what happened to this Angrboda? Did your return cure her madness?”

“No,” Loki shudders out. “She was found dead when I returned. She tore her heart out.”

Her blood runs cold, and she can feel invisible fingers reaching for her own heart.

“I’m sorry,” her boy cries out. “Will you leave me, now that you know?”

Sigyn swallows. “No,” she whispers. “I promised, and I love you so much.”

His lips are hot and soothing against her throat. “That’s the problem,” her boy whimpers. “Oh Nornir, that’s the problem.”

Sigyn smiles into his inky hair. “How could love be a problem?” She asks, in all her naivety.

-eight-

She is lounging in his private gardens when she hears a scream pierce the air _. Loki_.

Before she even knows what she’s doing, she’s running. Her skirts fly about her in a hurry, her feet hit the floor in a quick staccato as she dashes through the palace to her boy’s wing.

The screaming doesn’t stop, and Sigyn pounds on the door with one fist while trying to open it with the other. She forces the door open.

Her boy is a mess. Loki writhes on the floor, hands tangled deep in his dark hair. Tears stream from his eyes and down his face, dripping onto the marble. She stares at him in dumbfounded worry.

He sees her, and shrieks with the fury of a thousand einherjar. “Leave me be,” he howls, his words backed up with a pure, raw force that slams her back into the far wall of the hallway, and shuts the door behind her.

She swallows roughly, and sits outside his door.

Hours later, when the screaming has abated, he comes out of his room proud and straight. “Thank you,” he says quietly.

She says nothing in response, but takes his hand and brings it to her mouth. She kisses his wrist with passion, pressing her teeth against his pulse-point until he shudders.

-nine-

“I can’t love you fully,” her boy admits. “I can’t just be yours, as much as I wish I could.”

“Why not?”

“There are others who have me; those with mischief in their veins, with chaos in their eyes and schemes in their hearts, those who lie. They own me, and it hurts.” Loki rasps out. “I don’t know how you stand it.”

Sigyn does not cry or sob, though a few tears trickle down Loki’s face. “I can’t love you fully,” is not the same as “I can’t love you,” or “I don’t love you.” He doesn’t love her with his whole heart but he wants to, and _he loves her_.

So she smiles, reaching one hand up to wipe away his tears while he leans down to kiss her forehead. She laughs in simple happiness, catching his wrist in one hand.

“What do you want for dinner tonight?” She asks him, not letting his wrist go. And, “After dinner, we should bathe each other. I’ll wash your hair if you wash mine.”

-ten-

He is the god of liars, and that is a shame.

She knows the filth that have their way with him; where he lies for the art of it, the creation and cleverness that goes into creating a beautiful untruth, they lie to further themselves and for the impurity of it.

His mischief hurts him. His own nature kills him. Her boy never gains the weight he loses from his punishments back and stays half-starved.

Sigyn could not possibly save him from his fate without destroying everything that makes him _him_ : his cleverness would have to be gone, his lies, his slipperiness. She could not do that to him.

So instead of trying to save her boy, she practices making tourniquets out of linen and lets him kiss her softly. When he sleeps and cannot see her, she prays to the Tree.

-eleven-

She stares blankly at his corpse at her feet, loaded up onto a plain wooden boat to be burnt.

His lashes lie long against too-pale cheekbones, his body is clean and unnaturally still. Around him lies thistles that bite into Sigyn’s feet when she moves closer to Loki’s corpse and dry grass that itches her legs. Kindling for the funerary fire.

Sigyn, uncaring of propriety, drapes her body across him and cries into his shirt. Her tears wet the material, a few drops even dropping across her boy’s face.

She danced for this man. They slept on his furs, fully clothed like children after a harrowing day. She scraped her teeth against his throat.  He gave her his insides, his secrets and shames and loves. She saw him cry. She sees him dead. She remembers the swirling chaos in his eyes and the velvety words he’d whisper in her ears.

When the tears stop flowing, Sigyn leaves the boat and watches it as it is set aflame. The body of her boy goes up in ashes, all his possessions burnt with him, all his goals left behind.

 _Not all of his possessions_ , an insidious voice whispers into her ear, _and not all of his goals. Take up the mantle._

-twelve-

In her veins beats the word “godkiller” over and over, on repeat just like how her boy used to repeat her name. His voice drums inside her ears, whispering to her that she ought to avenge her poor sons.

She listens to the voice. Asgard lies in ruins around her, smoke filling the sky and people she once called family are only charred corpses on the ground.

Everyone is gone. Her boy, her sons…

She stifles a sob in the crook of her arm, and remembers the secrets Loki told her long ago. A first lover, driven to death by the madness he caused in her. Sigyn’s eyes flutter in anxiety but she resolves herself. She takes one deep breath.

She tears her heart out of her chest, and she kisses it like she kissed his lips, his arms, his ankles, his wrists, his eyelids. With blood on her lips and heart in her hand, she falls to the ground.

-end-


End file.
